League of Legends (LoL) can be a pretty daunting game for most new players, but the fundamentals often come together faster than you may think. From learning how to last-hit minions to familiarizing yourself with the huge roster of champions, all you need is a clear path to get you going. In our League of Legends beginner guide, we explain everything you need to get started on Summoner’s Rift, including the roles, champions, settings, progression, rewards, and essential early-game tips.
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Getting Started In League of Legends: Essential Beginner Steps
Before diving into the different roles and champions, it’s worth grounding yourself in how LoL actually works. Let’s go over the basics.
Basic Overview
Most of your time in LoL will be spent on Summoner’s Rift. This map features three lanes—top, mid, and bottom—each of which sees waves of minions regularly spawning and marching toward the enemy base, all connected by a neutral jungle territory.
Your primary goal is to work with your team to take down the enemy turrets guarding these lanes. Once the turrets fall, your final objective is to destroy the opposing team’s Nexus. The first team to destroy this structure wins.
All champions in LoL start off weak at Level 1, but they grow stronger by earning gold and experience. Most of this comes from last-hitting minions, which provides the resources needed to level up and buy items. Both are essential for increasing your damage, survivability, and impact on the Rift.
While nothing is guaranteed, a strong early game often sets the momentum that carries you into a late-game victory. That’s why nailing fundamentals like last-hitting, trading (short, safe exchanges in lane), and wave control (managing where the minion wave sits relative to your turret) is so important.
Roles And Champions
There are five main roles in LoL: Top, Jungle, Mid, Attack Damage Carry (ADC), and Support, each with different responsibilities and playstyles.
Although champions aren’t locked to a single role, most perform best in one or two spots based on how their abilities work. This is why it’s good to try different champions until you find what feels natural for you.
Some champions demand complex mechanics or specialized item builds, so starting with simpler choices is typically recommended to help you focus on essentials like map awareness, warding to track enemy movements, and using warning pings to alert your team about incoming danger.
Top Strategies For New Players
While it’s often forgotten, LoL is inherently a team-based game, and you’ll do well to remember that. Communication and teamwork often matter more than raw mechanics. And while skill will take you far, learning to play with your allies (and not against them) is the key to climbing the ranks and enjoying the game.
To support your growth, you can rely on the in-game shop’s recommended item paths. They’re designed to make the game more accessible, offering suggestions to counter opponents, boost your damage, or just survive.
As you improve, you’ll learn to adapt and itemize according to different matchups, so take advantage of these starting tools as you hone your skills. And rest assured, your gameplay will improve with practice, so don’t be afraid to fail.
Beginner Gameplay Settings To Improve Your Experience
It doesn’t occur to most players, but adjusting your LoL settings can significantly impact your overall in-game experience. After all, it’s no secret that the game’s default configuration is not well-optimized for beginners, slowing you down by limiting your visibility and encouraging mistakes that could otherwise be avoided.
However, by optimizing a few controls and interface settings, you can not only improve your gameplay and reaction time, but also remove any unnecessary barriers holding you back from perfecting ability timing, resource management, and target identification.
For example, enabling Quick Cast lets you cast abilities instantly, while reducing the HUD size and enlarging the minimap boosts your map awareness. Turning on spell cost indicators also helps you manage resources better, and displaying champion names above health bars makes it easier to identify targets during hectic fights.
Here are our recommended gameplay settings for LoL:
| Setting Category | Setting | Recommended Value |
| Hotkeys | Quick Cast | Enabled (Quick Cast All) |
| Quick Cast With Indicator | Disabled | |
| Interface | HUD Scale | 0% |
| Chat Scale | 50–70% | |
| Minimap Scale | 100% | |
| Show Names Above Health Bars | Champion Name | |
| Show Spell Costs | Enabled | |
| Champion Highlight on Camera Center | Enabled | |
| Game | Auto-Attack | Disabled |
| Graphics | Character Quality | High |
| Environment Quality | High | |
| Effects Quality | High | |
| Shadow Quality | Low | |
| Screen Shake | Disabled |
Recommended Beginner Champions By Role
With 172 champions in LoL, it can be tough even to know where to begin, especially as a new player. The following picks are designed with simple and accessible mechanics in mind, so you can focus on mastering the basics of positioning, trading, ability usage, and coordination.
Mid
- Annie: The Dark Child is a mage with tremendous pyromantic power. Her kit offers simple, reliable burst, with safe farming and easy last-hitting for the early laning stage.
- Lux: The Lady of Luminosity adds long-range poke, safe wave control, excellent crowd control, and big pick potential, without demanding any advanced mechanics.
Top
- Cho’Gath: The Terror of the Void is a formidable tank-mage hybrid that provides solid sustain and reliable wave control, with relatively simple but highly impactful crowd control for skirmishes.
- Darius: The Hand of Noxus is the ultimate beginner-friendly bruiser and lane bully with simple mechanics. His kit is simple enough to help you master spacing and trading, while punishing enemy mistakes.
ADC
- Ashe: The Frost Archer is a fantastic starter marksman, not only providing serious damage but also long-range poke, vision control, and powerful utility, thanks to her slows and global stun.
- Miss Fortune: The Bounty Hunter has a kit that boasts easy wave clear and strong spell-based poke, along with AoE abilities that make her an absolute menace in teamfights.
Support
- Leona: The Radiant Dawn is a tanky hard-engage support with reliable and intuitive crowd control, as well as simple all-in tools. She’s perfect for learning how to initiate, peel, and add pressure in the bot lane.
- Janna: The Storm Fury is a defensive enchanter support built around protecting carries. Her kit includes shields, heals, and crowd control, making her an excellent champion for learning the basics of defensive play.
Jungle
- Warwick: The Uncaged Wrath of Zaun is a simple and highly consistent jungler with good sustain and dueling patterns. His kit is easy enough to help beginners learn pathing and tracking, while also setting up reliable early pressure.
- Amumu: The Sad Mummy offers the easiest point-and-click engage, but exceptional impact in teamfights, thanks to his AoE control. His kit is also quite forgiving, allowing you to focus on taking objectives, ganking, and map awareness as a jungler.
Level Progression And Key Milestones For New Players
The level progression system is intentionally designed to make LoL easy to both understand and navigate for newcomers.
Early levels will focus on helping you learn the maps in LoL, practice abilities, and understand basic mechanics, while more complex gameplay, like Draft and Ranked modes, can be unlocked later, once you’ve had enough time to learn the fundamentals.
At Level 1, you can only play Co-op vs. AI (5v5) matches and draft from a limited pool of beginner-friendly champions. New accounts also begin with two basic Summoner Spells, Ghost and Heal, providing extra mobility and survivability in your initial matches.
As you level up, other modes, champions, and features will become available.
All Milestone Rewards In League of Legends
This table details all the Milestone Rewards you can unlock between Levels 1–30 in LoL. After that, you’ll get special “prestige” rewards (i.e., Legend Emotes, Summoner Icon, and Ward Skins) at certain levels.
| Level | Rewards | Unlocks |
| 1 | Legend Emote | Co-op vs. AI 5v5 modeNew Player Free Rotation |
| 2 | 450 BE | Free champion (Lux, Master Yi, Miss Fortune, Brand, or Darius) |
| 3 | 450 BE | Normal 5v5 Summoner’s Rift (Swiftplay)ARAM 5v5 Howling AbyssSmite (Summoner Spell) |
| 4 | 450 BE | Exhaust and Barrier (Summoner Spells) |
| 5 | 450 BE | Hextech Crafting |
| 6 | 900 BE | Mark and Clarity (Summoner Spells) |
| 7 | 900 BE + Poro Pal Emote | Flash and Teleport (Summoner Spells) |
| 8 | 900 BE + Random Ward Skin | — |
| 9 | 900 BE | Practice ToolIgnite, Cleanse (Summoner Spells) |
| 10 | 900 BE | Runes and custom rune pagesNormal 5v5 Summoner’s Rift (Draft)*Co-op vs. AI XP reduced to 90% |
| 11 | 130 BE + Random 1350 Champion Shards | Standard Free Champion Rotation |
| 12 | 450 BE | — |
| 13 | 450 BE | — |
| 14 | 500 BE | — |
| 15 | Random 4800 Champion Shards | First Win of the Day daily missions |
| 16 | 500 BE | — |
| 17 | 500 BE | — |
| 18 | Two Random 1350 Champion Shards | — |
| 19 | 600 BE | — |
| 20 | Random Summoner Icon + Random 4800 Champion Shards | Co-op vs. AI XP reduced to 80% (65% after 180 minutes) |
| 21 | 600 BE | — |
| 22 | 20 BE + Random 3150 Champion Shards | — |
| 23 | 725 BE | — |
| 24 | 725 BE | — |
| 25 | Random 4800 Champion Shards + Random Ward Skin | — |
| 26 | 725 BE | — |
| 27 | Random 450 Champion Shards + Random 3150 Champion Shards | — |
| 28 | 725 BE | — |
| 29 | Random 3150 Champion Shards + Random 450 Champion Shards | — |
| 30 | Glorious Champion CapsuleLegend Emote 2 | Ranked Solo/Duo and Ranked Flex *Co-op vs. AI XP reduced to 75% (55% after 180 minutes)Prestige leveling begins |
Note: Normal 5v5 Summoner’s Rift (Draft) will only unlock at Level 10 if you have played 10 Swiftplay games. Ranked Solo/Duo and Ranked Flex queues for 5v5 Summoner’s Rift will only unlock at Level 30 if you have played 10 Swiftplay or Normal Draft games AND own at least 20 champions.
Rewards And Incentives For New Players
In addition to Milestone Rewards, new LoL players can also benefit from various daily login rewards. These serve to both incentivize beginners and dampen the steep learning curve.
In your first week, you can unlock a roster of beginner-friendly champions, starting with Marksman (ADC) champions: Tristana, Caitlyn, or Ezreal, and later those from the Fighter, Mage, Controller, and Assassin classes. You can also unlock Hextech Chests (containing Skin Shards, Champion Shards, Emotes, and more) and Keys, plus a 3-day XP boost to speed up leveling.
Importantly, these welcome gifts are only available in the first week of creating your account. They’re also exclusive to accounts under Level 20, meaning you won’t be able to redeem them if you level up too quickly.
Here are all the daily login rewards available to new LoL players:
| Day | Login Rewards | Champion Selection (Choose 1) |
| 1 | Marksman champion + Hextech Chest | Tristana, Caitlyn, Ezreal |
| 2 | Fighter/Bruiser champion + 3 Key Fragments | Illaoi, Riven, Garen |
| 3 | Mage champion + 3-day XP Boost + Hextech Chest | Seraphine, Morgana, Ziggs |
| 4 | Controller champion + 2 Hextech Keys | Sona, Thresh, Nami |
| 5 | Assassin champion + Hextech Chest | Ekko, Fizz, Talon |
| 6 | 6,300 BE | — |
| 7 | Waterloo Miss Fortune Skin Shard + 500 OE | — |
Frequently Asked Questions For Beginners
Not sure about something? These frequently asked questions (FAQs) can help!
Who Are The Best Champions For Beginners?
Annie, Lux, Cho’Gath, Darius, Ashe, Miss Fortune, Leona, Janna, Warwick, and Amumu are the most beginner-friendly champions in LoL. Their roles and abilities are straightforward, making it easier to learn the fundamentals without feeling overwhelmed.
How Can I Quickly Improve My Gameplay?
To build early confidence in LoL, nail the basics like last-hitting minions, ability usage, warding, and map awareness. It also helps to master a small pool of champions (preferably those we suggested) and use recommended items and settings, such as Quick Cast.
Is The Game Free To Play?
Yes, LoL is entirely free to play. You can purchase champions and cosmetic skins with real money, but nearly everything is unlockable with Blue Essence, an in-game currency earned over time simply by playing the game.
Why Are Roles Important?
Roles are important because they influence how you play and contribute to your team. Each role, including ADC, Mid, Top, Jungle, and Support, has distinct responsibilities, playstyles, and impact on the Rift. By understanding your role, the entire game is easier to read and win.
How Do I Win Lane Or Improve Laning?
You can win the early laning stage in LoL by practicing efficient last-hitting and trading with enemy champions only when it’s safe to do so. While you’re at it, place wards to track the enemy jungler and retreat if you spot rotations, or if the lane pushes too far from your turret.
How Should I Select Items?
The in-game shop will recommend item paths for your champion and matchup. However, as you improve, you’ll learn to adjust your build to counter enemy champions, empower your team, deal with crowd control, or improve your damage and sustain in teamfights.
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